Books by Sidney H. Griffith

From 750 to 850 AD Christians, living under Islamic rule, began to compose theological works in Syriac and Arabic to counter the religious challenges of Islam. Griffith explores the works of writers who apologised for Christianity at that time.

A collection of studies on the theological and literary activities of the monks in Palestine in the early Islamic period. The papers are concerned especially with the translation of Christian texts into Arabic and the Christian reaction to developing Muslim theology.

Amid so much twenty-first-century talk of a "e;Christian-Muslim divide"e;--and the attendant controversy in some Western countries over policies toward minority Muslim communities--a historical fact has gone unnoticed: for more than four hundred years beginning in the mid-seventh century, some 50 percent of the world's Christians lived and worshipped under Muslim rule. Just who were the Christians in the Arabic-speaking milieu of Mohammed and the Qur'an? The Church in the Shadow of the Mosque is the first book-length discussion in English of the cultural and intellectual life of such Christians indigenous to the Islamic world. Sidney Griffith offers an engaging overview of their initial reactions to the religious challenges they faced, the development of a new mode of presenting Christian doctrine as liturgical texts in their own languages gave way to Arabic, the Christian role in the philosophical life of early Baghdad, and the maturing of distinctive Oriental Christian denominations in this context. Offering a fuller understanding of the rise of Islam in its early years from the perspective of contemporary non-Muslims, this book reminds us that there is much to learn from the works of people who seriously engaged Muslims in their own world so long ago.Some images inside the book are unavailable due to digital copyright restrictions.